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posted by takyon on Saturday January 12 2019, @05:08PM   Printer-friendly
from the chip-off-the-old...chip? dept.

Raspberry Pi Foundation Announces RISC-V Foundation Membership:

[The Raspberry Pi] Foundation has announced that it is joining the RISC-V Foundation, suggesting that a shift away from Arm could be on the cards. "We're excited to have joined the RISC-V Foundation as a silver member," the Raspberry Pi Foundation posted to its Twitter account. "[We're] hoping to contribute to maturing the Linux kernel and Debian port for the world's leading free and open instruction set architecture."

A shift from the proprietary Arm architecture to RISC-V would fit in nicely with the Foundation's goal of low-cost, highly-accessible computing for education and industry – but would put paid to its tradition of keeping backwards compatibility where possible, something it has already suggested might be the case when it moves away from the Broadcom BCM283x platform for the Raspberry Pi 4. Foundation co-founder Eben Upton, though, is clear: the Foundation is currently focusing on supporting the ISA in software, and not with a development board launch.

I'm curious how many Soylentils have a Raspberry Pi (or more than one) and which model(s). How has your experience been? What are the positives and shortcomings you've encountered? Do you think it would be a good move for them to move to RISC-V?

More background on RISC-V is available at Wikipedia.


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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 12 2019, @06:13PM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 12 2019, @06:13PM (#785607)

    The Pi isn't meant to be a general desktop replacement, and it would be fine if browsers didn't have so much overhead let alone the extra from video DRM.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 12 2019, @06:40PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 12 2019, @06:40PM (#785623)

    Bingo. I dont know why people cant get this thru their tiny minds.

    • (Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday January 12 2019, @07:01PM (1 child)

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Saturday January 12 2019, @07:01PM (#785632) Journal

      It could be used as a desktop replacement, depending on what software you're using and what you're doing with the web browser.

      Use adblock and script blocking in the browser like many here do, and that takes care of a lot of your problems.

      Raspberry Pi 4 will likely not be made on a 40nm process node like its predecessors. If they bring it down to 28nm or 14nm, there could be a significant performance increase. Not enough for everybody, but most people don't need a state-of-the-art computer these days.

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      • (Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday January 12 2019, @08:25PM

        by bzipitidoo (4388) on Saturday January 12 2019, @08:25PM (#785661) Journal

        Yes, I find Adblock absolutely essential on limited hardware such as older computers and Pis.

        Another performance trick I stumbled over was turning off the font aliasing and hinting. That makes no noticeable difference on modern hardware, but on something like a 133 MHz Pentium from the 1990s, it helps a lot. Of course that makes most fonts look awful. One of the few that still looks good is Terminus.

  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Saturday January 12 2019, @06:55PM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Saturday January 12 2019, @06:55PM (#785629) Journal

    The Pi isn't meant to be a general desktop replacement

    It could very well become that if hardware improvements outpace what the OS and typical software need. Even the bloated browsers.

    It seems that the Broadcom BCM2837B0 used in Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ is built on a 40nm process. The talk [raspberrypi.org] is that it is expensive to develop a new version using a more modern process node (duh) and that they have pretty much reached the limits of 40nm.

    Eben Upton has said that the Pi Foundation would shift away from hardware for a few years [wired.co.uk]. When they do come back with a major hardware release, they might include [wired.co.uk]
    something like a tensor processor, since Raspberry Pi is meant for students and machine learning is a big deal right now.

    So maybe we'll see a RasPi 4 released as late as 2021, on a mature "14nm" process (around the time TSMC is making "5nm"), and packing some Google-sponsored AI hardware. The performance increases could be exceptional and more than enough to make it a usable desktop replacement.

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